By Phil Williams
Photo: Research Professor of Botany and Genetics Susan R. Wessler. Photo by Paul Efland.
By Phil Williams
Susan R. Wessler, a Research Professor of Botany and Genetics at the university, has been elected to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.
Election to the National Academy represents the summit of career achievements for scientists and engineers in the United States, and only a small fraction of working scientists are elected to the group. Although anyone can suggest a name for membership, formal proposals for nomination must come from members of the Academy. New members and foreign associates are elected annually at the Academy's meeting in April.
Wessler is the second UGA faculty member named to the NAS in the past two years. In April 1997, Lois Miller, a professor of entomology and genetics, was elected to the group.
"I am obviously delighted to become a member of the National Academy," says Wessler. "It is a tribute to the work of many talented people in my lab over many years."
Wessler joins a small group of scientists at UGA who are members of the NAS. They include, in addition to Miller, Wyatt Anderson, John Avise and Norman Giles (emeritus), genetics; Eugene Odum, ecology (emeritus); Norman Allinger, chemistry; Brent Berlin, anthropology; and Glenn Burton, agronomy.
A native of New York City, Wessler received her bachelor's degree in biology, with honors, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974 and her doctoral degree in biochemistry from Cornell University in 1980. After serving a postdoc-toral fellowship in the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., she began her career at the University of Georgia in 1983 as an assistant professor of botany, rising through the ranks to full professor of botany in 1992. She became a professor of botany and genetics in the fall of 1993 and a Research Professor in 1994. In addition, she was director of the Center for Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology from 1991 to 1996.
"Susan Wessler is an outstanding scientist who has done pioneering work on transposable elements and their role in evolution," says Wyatt Anderson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and an NAS member. "I am delighted at her election."
Transposable elements, or transposons, were first discovered about 50 years ago. They are mobile pieces of DNA, distinct from genes, and they have been found in vast numbers in virtually every organism.
Wessler and her research group played a key role in analyz-ing the role of transposons in shaping plant genomes and creating the modified gene functions required for evolution.
Wessler's group discovered a new class of transposons called MITEs. Wessler's group has also shed new light on both the nature and evolution of gene regulation in maize.
Wessler received UGA's Creative Research Medal in 1991. She co-edited the journal The Plant Cell from1990 to 1995 and has been a member of the National Research ouncil Committee on Plant Sciences and the National Plant Genetics Resources Board.
She is co-author of The Mutants of Maize and has published numerous research papers. Her research has been supported by major grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the McKnight Foundation.
Wessler has taught many courses at UGA in botany and genetics. She is also a much sought-after speaker at seminars worldwide.
